When the Central Baptist Church built a wall to keep people out of a sheltered space alongside the church, the wall was quickly spray painted with the words “Hate Gate? WWJD?” Some Victorians were aghast. Who would do such a thing? Who would build a wall to displace — wait. They were mad about the spray paint?

Walking around town it’s obvious that a great deal of energy has been expended on policing skateboarders. They’re banned from certain areas, and everywhere you look metal obstacles have been installed to prevent grinding on ledges, railings, and benches.

Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design (CPTED) is a city and VicPD-endorsed policy that recommends using fences, rocks, lighting, and surveillance to make spaces unusable or inaccessible to poor and homeless Victorians. VicPD reports show that CPTED is not about “crime,” but about pushing people further to the margins. And the provincial government is an active participant.

When the province announced it was building a playground on the Tent City property, it said the soil needed to be removed to deal with “contaminants” including methamphetamines. The media duly reported that information, and why not? We can’t have children running around on meth-y soil in the Garden City. They might get a contact high!

When City Council updated its parks bylaws, it banned camping in playgrounds. Since that time, some members of the public have been demanding playgrounds in order to displace homeless campers from Tent City and other locations.

At the risk of being unpopular, let me suggest the following: the two proposed play areas for downtown Victoria – at the former Tent City site, and Reeson Park, a.k.a. the Whale Wall – are first and foremost about displacing poor and homeless Victorians. Creating space for children and families is a distant and secondary goal.

Last week the CBC published an article about a Vancouver property management company installing concrete balls to block people from accessing alcoves. Vancouver’s hate balls haven’t rolled across the Salish Sea quite yet, but Victoria is already doing much the same thing.

The sloppily added bricks on the planter in Odeon Alley are an obvious example of defensive architecture, but there are plenty of aggressive pieces out there, policing Victorians’ sitting habits. Let’s take a quick tour.

The art at Yates and Douglas is an exercise in pretending Victoria’s downtown is a fun, welcoming place for everyone to enjoy. It might even draw your eyes away from the multiple attempts to police and exclude people from the same space.

Odeon Alley – also known as Millie’s Lane and Maynard Court – runs beside the Odeon Theatre, from Johnson to Yates. It’s peppered with signs telling you what not to do. Rule number one: “no loitering.”

The corner of Douglas and Pandora is being redeveloped with office buildings and a plaza “for the enjoyment of the general public.” Before that proposal was unanimously approved by Victoria City Council in 2015, the city and the developer agreed that there should be limits on who can use the plaza, and how.